Kardea

You guys rock! Thanks to your help (and Pebble Garden's amazing tutorial videos), I have thus far: - Successfully put a manned lander on the Mun, then brought it back to Kerbal safely with crew intact. - Successfully put a probe lander on Minimus - Successfully refueled my orbiting space station using a drone-controlled refueling "spear", then used remaining RCS fuel to deorbit the spear, thus disposing of the debris - And, most recently, successfully put a manned rover on the Mun, a mere 20km from my "first kerbal on the moon" flag (was practicing "targeted" landing) Thanks a ton. Would not have known what to do without you guys' help. Which leads me to yet another two n00bish questions: 1) The only mod I'm using at the moment is the SubAssembly Loader (and I'm in love with it). HOWEVER! A lot of what I intend to do throughout my space program is via the use of docking ports. For instance, I would like to equip one of my larger vessels with a tiny, automated "one-shot" probe. I've built the probe and I've built the vessel. The problem arises when I bring on the Subassembly (the probe). The VAB seems to really not want to let me attach docking port to docking port, if you understand my meaning. I can do it on a piece-by-piece basis, sure, but the moment I take a construction with a docking port on one side and try to attach it to an already-placed port on my "main" vehicle, it doesn't want to "click" in place. Has anyone else figured out a way to do this? I -really- don't want to hand-build every probe I have on each craft... 2) This one is easy, hopefully: is there a way to move forward as a rover without any pod torque? Right now, my little Munrover is rather top-heavy and every time I hit "W" to move forward, I nearly risk toppling over (not to mention losing all traction on the back legs) because the game interprets "W" as "Hey, Jeb, lean the pod forward!" Anyone know a better way? Is there a button that simply "throttles up the wheels"?

Great info! So... yet another couple of quick questions: 1) Full thrust vs partial thrust (for reasons OTHER than overheating) at liftoff: is there a recognized advantage of one over another? Fuel consumption per unit of thrust per second doesn't change over the throttle spectrum, right? i.e: full throttle burns twice as much fuel as half-throttle and provides half the thrust, correct? If that's the case, then the only thing I could think of would be possibly throttling back to save fuel if you're going so fast that you're being limited by atmospheric resistance. Is that a correct deduction or is there something I'm missing? 2) Solid Rocket Boosters: is it just me or do they seem a bit underwhelming at the moment? I can't shake the feeling that they should have a lot more "oomph" to them (the larger-sized one, at least). They seem to burn out -real- quick and, while they make a semi-passable thrust augmentation to an existing 1st stage, it seems like you can just as easily build an even better booster out of a few fuel tanks and another engine. Am I missing something here, too? Sure, it's got a T/W ration of 4.08, but is that enough to warrant using 'em often?

Thank you, one and all, for your input! This is great info and exactly what I wanted to know. And NeoMorph, those tutorials look great. I've lived and died so far off of Pebble Garden's videos, so I'll have to check out the ones in your sig link for more goodness. THAT BEING SAID!... I have another followup question: Which is better for lifting payloads: A Rockomax with a Mainsail or a Rockomax, a 3-way adapter, and 3 LVT-30s/45s? I've seen both on the forums and I was hoping for a "ruling", so to speak. Is it a matter of simply adding up specific impulse? Or is there more of those nefarious maths at play?

So, As my first forum post here at KSP, I thought I'd ask a couple of questions that I've been seeking an answer to since I started playing last week. If these have been answered before, please forgive my ignorance (and feel free to point me in the right direction!). Thruster Use at Liftoff This is my "big" question, as it would completely change my current construction methodology: Let us suppose I have a rocket that consists of a single, central Rockomax tank + Skipper, surrounded by four additional Rockomax tanks + Mainsails. Is it a) better to burn then stage the Mainsails and then light the Skipper or light all engines at once and stage as the outer tanks burn out first? I'd LOVE some input here, as I'm not sure what the generally accepted KSP practice is. I know that when I watched Shuttle launches on TV as a kid, you can bet the shuttle's little engines were burning right beside the SRBs... Rovers & Other Non-powered Payloads What's the best way to get a rover onto another planet? Do treat it like it's own "stage"? Or have people found ways to construct ad-hoc "cargo bays" to carry them in? Load Balance (specifically, Piggybacking) Is it feasible to build a Space Shuttle-style piggyback setup, where you have the main lifter in the form of big engines/SRBs and a spaceplane or other manned craft "piggybacked" on the side? I've tried it once so far and, no matter how I tweaked, angled, and SRS'd it, I couldn't get the thing to not flip and crash inside of 400 meters up. Again, sorry if these are dumb questions! Any help would be massively appreciated, though. This is a heck of a game!